Born in 1904, he started experimenting with photography during the Thirties, instantly providing his own personal mark, also as a critic and a leading player in the cultural debate, becoming friends with some of the most important artists of the times. His photographic experience and aesthetic reflection, also promoted through photographic groups he founded such as "La bussola" in 1947, "Misa" in 1954, became the foundations for photographic language as an autonomous artistic expression, opposing the rhetoric fascist formulas, to rather express a concept of pure, essential and rigorous expression at a high level. He continued his artistic and research activities until his death in 1961.
Curated by Daniele Cavalli, Anita Margiotta, Federica Pirani
Giuseppe Cavalli's photographs are based on the pure pleasure of vision and of wandering with one's eyes within the light.
This is the pleasure of a vision of the beautiful that the photographer experimented naturally through a specific technical choice: and it could not be otherwise, as Benjamin correctly wrote "in photography the decisive element always remains the photographer's relationship with his technique". Cavalli's choice was that of so-called "higher tonalities", and hence the lighter ones, tending to white.
It is in the overflowing light that this photographer looks for his goddess. This was said clearly already in 1950 by Piero Donzelli, one of the best Italian 20th century photographers, in the magazine "Ferrania": "Cavalli has a sense of con...